Advertising & Expectations

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I've been a film fanatic ever since my parents took me to see the first Star Wars movie (now known simply as Episode IV). Since I've also been a big advertising fan since... well, since I was old enough to watch TV, it stands to reason that movie trailers (the advertising of movies) kind of rank pretty high on my list of attention-grabbers.

But here's the rub: Most trailers these days aren't any good. They used to be. There used to be a certain degree of savoir-faire when it came to cutting movie trailers. They were exciting. They made you want to see more. They made your mouth water.

Not so anymore.

Most trailers now seem to be disjointed and pointless. The rule of the day seems to be "okay, let's throw as much crap as we can into that twenty-second spot as we possibly can. Priority 1: Explosions. Priority 2: The funniest line in the movie. Oh... and let's add 20 extra seconds of useless footage at the end just to explain the entire plot of the movie to the portion of the audience who isn't savvy enough to want to see the movie without having it explained A-Z upfront."

Yawn.

To be fair, note that I said "most" not "all." Some trailers are great. The Chronicles of Narnia had one of the most tantalizing theatrical trailers I've ever seen, and it's barely a year old. But it stands out as being one of the very few great movie ads of the past decade.

So before I go on, let me throw a little note to the powers that be in Hollywood: Please, please, please, stop putting out lousy trailers. Please!!! Aside from the fact that bad trailers don't entice people to go see the movies they advertise (no, really, think about it), those of us who look forward to them are getting tired of having our expectations shattered by remedial, poorly cut junk.

How hard is it to put together an exciting 30-60 second spot with 90+ minutes of footage? If my neighbor's kid can do it for free on his PC and post it to YouTube, surely, a highly paid studio editor can do a half-decent job. Right?

But enough about that. Read the fascinating (and quick) post on Tom Asacker's blog about advertising's effect on expectations rather than simply sales. (It deals with movie trailers.) Here's a sliver:

"Instead of examining the effect of advertising on sales, we examine how advertising affects the updating of market-wide sales expectations. The focus on expectations creates a valuable advantage. Our measure of expectations, which is derived from a stock market simulation, is an accurate predictor of sales."